HARLINGEN — It was called Rattlesnake Junction before it evolved into Six-Shooter Junction.
Whatever the name, what eventually became the City of Harlingen has a historical fabric that continues to be a rich one.
Some 20 high school students from three Harlingen schools took the tour of downtown yesterday morning. Like pretty much any activity that can get you out of class on a beautiful morning, they liked it a lot.
“It’s awesome,” said Alyssa Sanchez, who attends Harlingen High School. Hers was a commonly repeated phrase Thursday.
“I didn’t really know a lot about it,” said Analicia Alvarez, a Keys Academy student, of the history of Harlingen going back to the days of founder Lon C. Hill. “I don’t think most of us knew about this.”
“It was very informative,” said Justine Corkill, a senior at Harlingen High School, “because I’m not from here. I’ve lived here for a while, but I didn’t know a lot of these things.”
Some of those things were early names for Harlingen, like Rattlesnake Junction (it was pretty rough and undeveloped brushland then) and Six-Shooter Junction.
The latter, explained tour guide Joie Rose Laney, was because the early train station where travelers stopped to disembark was outside the Texas Rangers headquarters that had been built and offered to the Rangers by Lon C. Hill.
For the rest of this story and many other EXTRAS, go to our premium site, www.MyValleyStar.com.
Subscribe to it for only $6.99 per month or purchase a print subscription and receive the online version free, which includes an electronic version of the full newspaper and extra photo galleries, links and other information you can’t find anywhere else.
